Neighbor discovery protocol is used by IPv6 protocol for router discovery, address resolution, duplicated address detection, unreachability detection, and other features. On a switching module capable of supporting a large number of virtual machines and/or hosts, as the number of hosts/virtual machines grows, the amount of neighbor discovery messages exchanged between hosts and a central controller processor may be overwhelming. This can potentially overload the central controller processor and increase the possibility of failures.
As such, there exists a need for an IPv6 neighbor discovery distribution module that can distribute the neighbor discovery traffic to the various switching devices. This may allow for an increase in scalability and stability for switching modules capable of supporting a large number of virtual machines and/or hosts.